Voting Power and Voting Blocs

Dennis Leech and Robert Leech

No 269610, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: We investigate the applicability of voting power indices, in particular the Penrose index (aka absolute Banzhaf index), in the analysis of voting blocs by means of a hypothetical voting body. We use the power of individual bloc members to study the implications of the formation of blocs and how voting power varies as bloc size varies. This technique of analysis has many real world applications to legislatures and international bodies. It can be generalised in many ways: the analysis is a priori (assuming formal voting and ignoring actual voting behaviour) but can be made empirical with voting data; it examines the consequences of two blocs but can easily be extended to more.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Political Economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2004-07-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269610/files/twerp716b.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/269610/files/twerp716b.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uwarer:269610

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.269610

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().